In any organization of significant size, countless documents are generated during the normal course of running the organization. Document distribution and document retrieval need to be efficient operations so that information can reach their destination in a timely manner. This can become a non-trivial task if the organization is widely distributed over a large geographical area. When information is added, removed, or otherwise modified, the additional information must likewise be disseminated efficiently to ensure the information is current.
Various considerations must be taken into account. Limitations in physical storage generally preclude a solution which involves brute force large-scale duplication of documents throughout the organization. In the case of multimedia files which typically are very large, the bandwidth required to send copies of such files to all sites becomes prohibitive.
Another technique is a peer-to-peer architecture in which a file server at each site in an organization can access the other file servers. However, this approach restricts the use of security features such as firewalls.
Shared file systems are another commonly used architecture for sharing documents. However, the centralized nature of a shared file system exhibits degraded performance when loaded by many users. Shared file systems have limited security features which may not be acceptable in some situations.